Linkey-Links

Articles that deserve further commentary from me, but due to my lack of focus will just be getting the props.

As a follow-up to my teacher post a few weeks ago, this top-emailed article on teaching as a second career for those in midlife (something I might do myself in thirty years) brings me back to wondering how plentiful these teaching jobs are. In theory, programs like this are great. But is there competition between new young teachers and new older teachers? Do the programs stack up? With so many different routes to becoming a teacher, what's the best way? Can these things even be quantified? Malcolm Gladwell argued for a whole new way to evaluate teachers in a well-known piece in the New Yorker, a contradictory argument that seems very difficult to put into practice. I'm still just as lost about teacher trouble as I ever was, but teaching seems a great second or third career, and I am all for good programs that can provide this service.

CareerCast listed its top jobs for 2010, ranking them on salary, stress, work environment, and job outlook. Media jobs uniformly did poorly, though there were a lot of questionable top choices: historian? philosopher? Anthropology did well, though I have a sneaking suspicion that those who hold that degree don’t feel so secure. A lot of jobs seemed to be low-level, ones that may not require a college diploma, like cosmetologist, waiter, and typist. (Who the hell is a typist now? It’s administrative assistant, though that category is filled by “receptionist.”) There wasn’t a lot of amorphous jobs, those tricky titles or stuff like “venture capitalist” or “hedge fund manager”, where you really wonder what the person does, or jobs where you wonder what a MS in environmental engineering will do. I was very amused by PR executives having the seventh most stressful job out of the ones listed (#193 out of 200).

Must-read on how writers are losing their monetary value. Very sad and scary, like a lot of other stories about the profession:

What's sailing away, a decade into the 21st century, is the common conception that writing is a profession -- or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage.

[...]

The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough.

The rank of stories unwritten -- like most errors of omission -- is hard to conceive. Even those inside journalism can only guess at what stories they might have paid for, if they had more money.

Media analyst and former newspaper editor Alan Mutter worried last month about the ongoing "journicide" -- the loss of much of a generation of professional journalists who turn to other professions.

Writers say they see stories getting shorter and the reporting that goes into some of them getting thinner.

A former staff writer for a national magazine told me that she has been disturbed not only by low fees (one site offered her $100 for an 800-word essay) but by the way some website editors accept "reporting" that really amounts to reworking previously published material. That's known in the trade as a "clip job" and on the Web as a "write around."

"The definition of reportage has become really loose," said the writer, also a book author, who didn't want to be named for fear of alienating employers. "In this economy, everyone is afraid to turn down any work and it has created this march to the bottom."

I try not to patronize websites that are purveyors of what I call the "rewrite." There's a difference between commentary (Gawker) and straight-up rehash of news, and I want the real stuff. But I wonder about all the many young people who can't get into journalism now, as they are picked up by related professions, the social media world, or the great swath of unemployment. You can't have more and more PR professionals and fewer and fewer journalists; who will report the news?

On media predictions in 2010: Besides that Apple Tablet that’s taking up far too much speculation, there’s the sense that a lot of news outlets will start charging. As a Times print subscriber, I might be safe for that dear site, but this will mean big changes to anyone who consumes news on a regular basis, and don’t think you can circumvent it with Google News. It might even mean the end of such necessities as Hulu, too.

How the other half lives: I would only ever watch these programs out of sheer curiosity. Excellent moneymaker, just not my cup o' tea.

Peggy Noonan’s excellent column from December, on the cultural split she terms “The Adam Lambert Problem”:

America is good at making practical compromises, and one of the compromises we've made in the area of arts and entertainment is captured in the words "We don't care what you do in New York." That was said to me years ago by a social conservative who was explaining that he and his friends don't wish to impose their cultural sensibilities on a city that is uninterested in them, and that the city, in turn, shouldn't impose its cultural sensibilities on them. He was speaking metaphorically; "New York" meant "wherever the cultural left happily lives."

For years now, without anyone declaring it or even noticing it, we've had a compromise on television. Do you want, or will you allow into your home, dramas and comedies that, however good or bad, are graphically violent, highly sexualized, or reflective of cultural messages that you believe may be destructive? Fine, get cable. Pay for it. Buy your premium package, it's your money, spend it as you like.

But increasingly people feel at the mercy of the Adam Lamberts, who of course view themselves, when criticized, as victims of prudery and closed-mindedness. America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it.

It's things like this, every bit as much as taxes and spending, that leave people feeling jarred and dismayed, and worried about the future of their country.

All these things—plus Wall Street and Washington and the general sense that most of our great institutions have forgotten their essential mission—add up and produce a fear that the biggest deterioration in America isn't economic but something else, something more characterological.

And finally, the XX Factor’s take on this New York Observer article on American women dating Canadian and European guys:

But contrary to the "Own me! Own me!" view of commitment, all of the New York women I know lingering in lasting long-term but nonconjugal unions are doing so because they're not ready to get married, not because they're anxiously biding time until their boyfriends decide to pop the question.

It'd be nice to see an article that depicts women as the well-rounded, rational beings that they are. You know, people who have multidimensional thoughts about marriage and don't morph into rom-com cliches the minute the word is dangled before their faces. I'm not the only one who finds the prospect of marrying someone you've known for three months, let alone someone you met at a bus depot, totally terrifying. So why am I always reading about it like it's some sort of female fantasy come true? Besides, most of the ladies interviewed for this article are only 25, 26, 27 years old. How much terrible dating could they have endured?

The key difference seems to be rooted in economics:

When we talk about dating or the possibility of having family, with a man or on our own or with—gasp!—a coven of like-minded women (why not?), the conversation is framed entirely by the fact that we can count on our native countries to look after us should we—for whatever reason—not be able to make ends meet stateside. Now, we should be able to secure decent futures for ourselves, with or without male partners…

[…]

The calculus of long-term committment [sic] is just different when your country guarantees the basic necessities of an advanced civilization. When your government provides you, as they do in Canada and in Europe, with health care that is unlinked to a job or "productivity," subsidized prescription drugs, child care, free education through graduate school, and, finally, old-age pensions with visiting nurses if you need them to retain your health and a modicum of dignity. Marriage, ultimately, is about family, however you shape it. I sometimes don't blame men here for being lame or commitment-phobic. They're probably terrified of failing as providers or co-providers.

My biggest peeve with the first criticism is that the New York Observer piece is ostensibly about New York men. Like Sex and the City, they are dealing with a very specific demographic, one that might get overblown. New York men are known to be a different breed than men from the rest of the country, and they get married later than their peers from outside the area, just like the women. Sure, plenty of women complain about commitment-phobic men, but you can make the same case that there are plenty of women who feel the same. After all, I’ve known a few couples where it was the men who wanted to settle down first, but it was the women who felt that marrying young would hold them back. Now that we have longer lives and a life that is fundamentally, on all levels, less secure, why should we make major decisions that can lock us in for what seems like eternity?

WaPo Fail

There was a little incident in Washington recently. An impromptu snowball fight caused a police officer to take out his gun. This turned into a big deal. It became an even bigger deal when the story was inaccurately covered by the Washington Post; their account was contradicted by other outlets and notably a YouTube video of the event.

The whole story is a fascinating example of the power of social networks, ingenuity, and journalism.

The Washington Post did write the "real" story a few days later, but by then they had been widely criticized for their erroneous coverage and for not having the balls to fess up for their wrongdoing, correcting their record properly. Their piece is pretty good, but it got lost in the shuffle between other snowstorm-related stories (especially in the print edition) and the cacophony of criticism, most notably from their main competitor, the Washington City Paper:

Yet the reason why the Post screwed this up is that they all have linkophobia. If you link to an outlet---such as, God forbid, the Washington City Paper---you've lost. You got scooped and all your colleagues are going to look down on you. Linking is a huge sign of weakness---you just can't do it. Far better to, like, call a top police official, buy his version of events, and just place it in a post, regardless of the contradicting evidence that's already posted elsewhere.

Take a close look at that 10:20 update on the maybe-gun-pulling cop: "The plainclothes D.C. police detective may have unholstered his pistol during the confrontation with participants in the huge snowball fight, based on video and photos posted on the Internet."

Bold and italics are mine. They're mine because this is the most cowardly, selfish, arrogant news conduct out there today. What the fuck is "video and photos posted on the Internet"? How does that help readers? It's as if I can go to www.internet.com, and there, on the first screen, will be the video and photos of the snowball fight and the maybe-gun-wielding cop. "Posted on the Internet" would be acceptable if this were 1997.

The reporters used this hazy phrasing because they were too chicken-shit to do something that we all have learned to do over the past, say, decade or more. And that's to link to competitors and acknowledge their contributions to stories.

The tone is harsh, but it’s a blog, much like Gawker serves to rip apart the New York Times. The truth is, Erik Wemple is right. How can you ignore the rest of the world? I assumed that it was common practice now to link to other outlets and acknowledge the competition when necessary in covering stories. The idea, as the Times has written, is that you want to be as accurate as possible, and if that means getting scooped, then so be it. You want to have all the facts, and the reporting should be stronger and as fleshed out as possible. By not acknowledging other outlets, you make yourself look stupid at best, lose credibility at worst, as seen here.

Back In the Saddle Again

It is quite embarrassing that I haven’t posted anything in over two months. It seems, just looking at my output, that my enthusiasm has waned in 2009. This isn’t the case—I am a person whose thoughts on a given subject far outpace any action related to it—and it is something I am always trying to rectify.

Those I know personally who read this blog know that I suffered from overwork, exhaustion, and pains in my hands and arms that essentially forced me to stop blogging for the sake of my health. I was no real writer, as I did not sacrifice my precious down time to spend it on the computer.

But I was also deeply embarrassed by my previous comments on Twitter.

I didn’t even want to write again about Twitter, having another post tagged under it. But I feel I need to redress previous comments made. Over the past two months, I grew to hate the service. It overtook my life. Companies demand to know how many tweets on a given topic are said on a particular day, and to compile these numbers is overwhelming, in a nutshell. I’ve read all the positive press, from Steven Berlin Johnson’s cover in Time (which I would have known in advance had I not been so ridiculously busy June 4, as I follow him), to well, pretty much any mainstream story on it that appeared on Google News. And I am just so fucking sick of fucking Twitter.

I tried it out. It’s too short for my liking, too much information too fast, and not a reliable way to filter through. Unlike checking email and blogs and Facebook and all our other online “chores”, I didn’t want to invest the time in it, and so I didn’t. It’s like a pet—if you love animals and reap real benefit, great. But if you have no desire to spend your time and resources on it, then don’t.

I’ve also grown to dislike the way certain industries tout its service, and how it’s become a necessity for interaction, a requirement. I want to opt out! I don’t want to be forced to take part!
I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about Twitter (this was before I had grown to full-on hate it, when I was still in ambivalent mode), and we both found blogging to be far more useful. Twitter is too maniacal for her, an assault of nonsensical, mundane thoughts strewn with links. Blogs were thoughtful, occasionally insightful and filled with information and humor.

Of course, in the interim between this post and my last post, there have been plenty of stories written about this, how many bloggers have moved on to other mediums, who can't find the time, and yet, in every conceivable publication imaginable, how beneficial the service is and why you need to have one.

People use the service for different reasons—for youngsters as a way to have private conversations online, when Facebook becomes too crowded, or to find jobs, or sources of stories—but I find it an inept social tool, and I vastly prefer forms that let me wax on, connect, and share without limits or distractions. Unfortunately, as much as I want Twitter to die a quick death, it probably won’t happen. I can hope that it becomes MySpace—passé, off-putting, occasionally worth a peek for its public properties, but otherwise an ailing media property that has cash-flow problems and is too loud for most people.

***

So what else could have been blog-worthy?

I found out about Michael Jackson’s death relatively early—a coworker blasted through, announcing it. I went on Google News immediately, found nothing but cardiac arrest, and demanded proof. “TMZ! TMZ! Check it!” Still very skeptical, I did—and was met with a three-sentence item followed by “more to come.”

So the most interesting thing throughout the entire excess coverage of this exceedingly bizarre person for me was the timing and accuracy of the information, that for many people, myself included, we didn’t believe the story until it was confirmed by more traditional outlets. As the Los Angeles Times put it,

“Few people expect TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do not seem terribly high. If CNN, Fox … got such things wrong, the consequences would likely be higher.

As much as people love to glee over the death of the mainstream media, we still rely on them heavily for trusted information, for confirmation and access, no matter the story. Yes, our trust in them has eroded over the decades, each successive scandal further lowering the scale, but online hoaxes are quick, and Twitter and its ilk are just as much about hype, rumor and misinformation as the high school prom. But, as much as I dislike TMZ and the ever-larger paparazzi mill, they are becoming a trusted source in their field.

Effin’ Twitter, or The Personal Revolution

This is the second of two entries on Twitter.



“Since when has Twitter become the big thing?” my brother asked me the other week, in reference to the Ashton Kutcher/CNN “battle” that came to a head two Thursdays ago. Twitter, which has been around for a few years, was having its Best Week Ever.

I have been debating whether to join Twitter for months, even before Clive Thompson’s fantastic article last summer, which definitely put me in the “no way” camp. I have enough technology ruling my life, and I am always struck by the difference between the rat race of the internet and the slowed pace of those who just don’t give a damn. But in the last couple of months, it seemed inevitable that I would join.

I already read certain people’s Twitter feeds. It was interesting to see their thoughts on a topic, however brief, and some people were genuinely interesting. It also offered an unfiltered look, much realer than any documentary could show, at certain stars and their lives, just because they were the ones speaking, instead of through publicists or agents and interviewers. Many people, from Julia Allison to Emily Gould to Ashton Kutcher himself (5:00) have commented on this, the ability to write your own story, create your old world, a historical record if you will, without others defining you. That is a real draw, to have an authentic self out there.

But in this day and age, with “authentic” and “brand” nearly always in the same sentence, one has to practically be a brand to get any traction. Job seekers are told they have to market themselves, to think of themselves as a product or service that someone needs, and that they stand for something. Twitter takes this further: each person’s tweets, an extension of themselves, make up their essence, and that essence has to be sold. Britney Spears has an account, but it is not just her, it is the Britney brand. John Mayer is John Mayer, and while some could argue he is a brand, he’s just doing his thing. Having a Twitter, like having one’s own webpage, is considered by many to be an essential part of one’s brand.

But we all don’t need to be brands, and this segues into the way consumerism has infiltrated every part of our lives. Brands can evolve, but they really don’t. People are constantly in flux, unformed. There is much said about the constraints of growing up online, and we are seeing all the time how someone needs to take back something said or an image presented in the past, just because it doesn’t fit them anymore. Seeing discarded or old identities online is funny yet sad, a nostalgia instantly available. I wonder about all the digital graves I will leave in my life—email addresses and webpages discarded after they are no longer useful, friends and relationships that no longer have the glue they once did, but merely a thumbnail reminder that you do, in fact, know them, that you were once someone else. I think about the future of social networks (Twitter is included in the definition) all the time: Will we, as a generation, get tired of Facebook and its ilk as we grow older, finding it too time consuming? Will we get tired of being constantly connected and a new movement to go off the grid start? Will it merely be just another aspect of the web that everyone has, like email, or will it grow into its own subculture, just another thing that some people do but that others don’t?

The 140 character limit, and the loss of grammar and complete thought, is another criticism of Twitter. It is hard to write compelling in such a short space, and indeed I have had to, wincingly, used abbreviations and netspeak that I normally avoid. But like anything else, Twitter is what you make of it. I see Twitter as a place to share information. It’s different from a Facebook status update in that it isn’t some musing blasted out to 200 of your friends, but to a group of people you may not necessarily know, and that can be tracked and categorized so that strangers can read what you’re thinking. Companies, including Twitter’s founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, are working on monetizing this, since some companies like Dunkin Donuts and JetBlue have become success stories using the service, showing marketing and business people how to interact with their customers and drive brand loyalty. I personally do not care about such things—even links of coupons will just ennoble me to spend money on things I don’t need or want, and to get caught up in unnecessary chatter.

“Unnecessary chatter” is how those who denigrate the service would describe it. It is very true. Everyone wants to be listened to, but no one has the patience to listen to others. Following hundreds or thousands of people is time-consuming, sure, and the importance of the information received varies, yet we all want others to take us seriously, even if it’s just in jest. I often wonder, since I follow a lot of journalists, how the hell they manage to get any work done. I know I don’t, and I’ve been on the service for only a short time.

The hype has made a whole bunch of folks rush out and create an account, trying to see if they can figure out the service and maybe garner some love. Yet at times it’s ridiculous, as Brian Williams points out on The Daily Show a few weeks ago:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Brian Williams
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

How did John McCain go from being technologically illiterate to a functional Twitterer? How in the world did congressmen not realize that snarking on the president when he’s about to give an important speech would be seen as a stupid thing? Dude, I’m already conscious that I can be found on Twitter and that if I say something wrong, it will get back to me, and I’m not a chosen representative. But I made that choice, the choice to promote myself (it is very much a marketing and promotional tool), and decided after much handwringing, to say fuck it and do it.

I agree with many, many of the arguments against Twitter, and Samantha Bee and The Daily Show, as usual, summed it up perfectly:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Twitter Frenzy
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Media frenzies, especially when you are somewhat involved, even peripherally, are hard to escape. But I’ve noticed that my enthusiasm has waned. It would never occur to me to list my boring activities for the day; those are better meant for people for whom it interests. It is very much a broadcasting service, but it’s not the fashion reserved for that witty away message that so dominates college life. Not enough people try to be witty on Twitter, and in some ways it’s a great stalking tool, since people you don’t know will reference who they are hanging out with and where.

Numbers-wise, Twitter isn’t anything like Facebook, especially in terms of early adopters. Young people aren’t flocking to Twitter; they may be wetting their feet now, but it was mostly business and tech people who called it home for the most part at first, since they were the ones to grab onto it as a marketing platform back when we were all figuring out what the heck a newsfeed was. Young people are getting credited, but the teenagers aren’t helping us out, since they’re still on Facebook and MySpace. But it’s a given that a technological fad would be started by those young, tech-savvy people, since those two adjectives are now best friends.

There was the little blip on the radar that Oprah now Twitters, though she made quite a faux paus on her first day (calling the twitterati “Twitters” instead of “Twitterers” and posting in all caps, the latter inexcusable), which was a giant groan to the rest of the world who know that Oprah = massive mainstream takeover. All the mothers who don’t already blog will now be running on Twitter, the thinking goes. But it turns out that large numbers of people abandon the service within a month, and Twitter has what many see as a shockingly low retention rate of 40%. Twitter does take getting used to, and it does have a bit of a bad rap; in addition, its web site sucks, and while the idea behind Twitter is simple, mastering the language and the apps and the whole culture is confusing as hell. (Hashtags, anyone?)

While it’s great for passing information, sometimes getting too much credit as a form of new journalism, it is also ripe for misinformation. Twitter can be just another RSS feed (or a series of them), or it can be a note-taking device, a sort of journal of your world, a incredibly long, incredibly complex system of notes on your life, a version of what went down when and where, what you were willing to expose and to who, what anguished you and enraged you and filled you with joy, hope, and laughter. What you loved and lost, cried over and found. Who you were, at any given moment in time.

If it is possible to encapsulate your life from every bit of online activity recorded, all the reminders, questions and problems would add up to another sort of log. This scares a lot of people and excites others; it’s all about who controls the information, and the limits of the controls that are placed on the user. We look back at the past from letters and photographs, but now we can add status and away messages to the litany of LiveJournal-like musings that take up any one of our days.

But the personal revolution of information is not just based on observations and randomness—two words that can describe the web—but on how we shape what we want to know. Facebook has predicated many of its recent redesigns on this premise, so that we get updated news reports on the Mets next to photo albums of our friends. Twitter takes this to the next level, with us following people who hand off information that we’re interested in. We’re our own personal wire service, disseminating information strictly related and of importance to ourselves. The personal revolution.

This, of course, has wide-ranging implications in all sorts of industries, from watching the ascent of iTunes singles to newspapers going the way of our own personal online mashup of news. Of course, it is not necessary to embrace the entire spectrum of the personal revolution; clearly, those that mock Twitter endlessly do not see it in the same continuum as picking and choosing what news sources and stories to follow. Twitter is merely another tool in today’s information-gathering box.

***

As my thoughts on Twitter evolved over the past couple of months and weeks, I saw its real value shift from being about promotion to one about conversation. I could follow people all I want, read their tweets without having an account. But responding, and hoping that maybe someone you think is really cool will respond to you and maybe follow you too, is the way to engage. It sounds so incredibly cliché, and it is, but it’s about choosing to “participat[e] in a large public square...to be part of a broad dialogue,” as danah boyd points out. So yeah, maybe I did want a larger audience to be subjected to my incredibly witty observations, but I also wanted to talk to and engage with those who I thought were cool for one reason or another, to see what would happen, to have my voice heard, if only by a few people on the larger issues of the day.

So to those haters, of which I was once a part: Yes, Twitter is dumb. Yes, it is information overload. But while you acknowledge that Twitter does have some real uses and has spawned real knowledge and awareness, you can’t only laud the service when it fits that purpose. Meaning, you cannot have it be a source for youth protests without having many of the same users use it to chatter about how hot or cold the weather is. People tend to talk about Twitter in its extreme forms—either as a watercooler news source for stories that are just breaking, or as a way for the bored and lonely to pretend that the people really care about what they are eating for breakfast. Yes, those examples exist, but the vast majority of tweets fall in between, and people are genuinely trying to connect to someone, even if it is under the auspicious reasoning of broadcasting to the world that you loved last night’s episode of House.

Rejoice!

Obama was very good for the media.

Many newspapers sold out yesterday. My parents emailed me late in the afternoon asking if I could get a copy of the Times, since my dad was unable to find any in Manhattan. It never even occurred to me that this would happen, though it seems so obvious.

Though I knew it was a long shot, I drove around my neighborhood for an hour, stopping in several convenience stores, delis, drugstores, even a Shop-Rite and a Starbucks. A few Daily Newses and Records, but picked clean. I was told that by early morning everything was gone. Felled by fatigue and hunger, I returned home with the Record

and the Daily News
in hand.

I get chided for keeping so many newspapers and magazines, but they really are great (and cheap) mementos. Most of the keepsakes from my trip to Europe this summer were publications in other languages. Why buy an overpriced shot glass that was made in China anyway when you can get an authentic piece of the moment? I looked at all the magazines strewn on my floor before I went to bed Tuesday night, knowing Obama won, and I knew they were history now--all the speculation, all the wonder, it was answered affirmatively. They were no longer current.

Here's the Times' simple cover:

(The Newseum's site has images of practically every newspaper in the world.)

Another One Bites the Dust

Print media is going up in flames this week.

First came the news Friday that my beloved Radar—the only magazine I’ve ever subscribed to—has folded. Then the Star-Ledger, which has been having massive problems the past few months and is on the brink of extinction, despite being New Jersey’s largest newspaper and the 15th highest-circulation in the country, will cut almost 40% of its workforce by the end of the year.

And today, the Christian Science Monitor will cease publishing the actual physical newspaper during the week and become online-only in April.

My heart bleeds for the rapid demise of this once vibrant sector. It’s not that no one wants to read a newspapers, it’s just they’re expensive (I love my Times, but I debate every week if it’s worth the cost), and it’s easier to read things online. But subscription services may not be the way to go, either—TimesSelect was notoriously unpopular, fettering access to some of the best parts of the paper, the opinion section—since many people won’t bother to pay for it.

While they are many things I’d rather read hard copies of—Time, Newsweek, RollingStone, long magazine articles found in the Times Magazine—it often seems superfluous for me to pay money for content I can get for free, through other means. Indeed, if I didn’t have an outlet for getting my hands on so many different magazines, I would probably be broke buying everything I want to read. But truthfully, I like hard copies. A lot. I can go over the same passages, make notes if I so desire, carry the information with me, take in the whole thing as part of a package. But I understand very well why many people—especially young people—have no interest in print. It’s money, money that can be spent elsewhere. A lot of information can be found online or on television. Paper is a valuable resource, and then there’s the space and time it takes up. Recycling is no match for the environmental ease of emailing. Online offers links within the articles, easily accessible sources and support, which just aren’t there in print. A sidebar is not the same thing.

Yet I want to support the newspaper industry as much as possible. Besides, a printout of the article isn’t the same as the actual article, with graphics and fancy fonts and nice paper. The former may get yellowed, but it becomes a treasure, while a printout is just a copy, likely to get thrown out.

Radar collapsed not for lack of trying—it was on its third incarnation—but because it was a print publication doing what blogs like Gawker and Daily Intel do on a daily basis. Gawker itself summed up why it has finally ceased publication: basically, it suffered from bad timing. Although Radar’s blog, Fresh Intelligence, managed to grab scoops, it treaded on territory already run into the ground—snarky, funny takes on anything to do with entertainment. And in this media landscape, “Pop. Politics. Scandal. Style.” was covered everywhere else. In fact, entertainment coverage is dominated by what seems to be a singular voice: snarky.

Radar was never derivative. It was often hilariously, laugh-out-loud funny, and they dared to mock established magazine covers, including Vanity Fair’s infamous Tom Ford cover.

Radar followed the pedigree of Spy and Talk, two magazines that also ultimately folded because they couldn’t build up enough capital. Radar, in fact, is from the hallowed halls of Tina Brown’s Talk; Maer Roshan, Radar’s editor-in-chief, worked for Talk, New York, and a host of other cool magazines.

I still have all my back issues of Radar from the last year. I never got around to finishing most of them (that’s the problem when I buy, not borrow). There was a time, in high school and on the first incarnation of Radar, where I briefly dreamed of writing for the magazine. Now I can’t even dream of writing for their blog.

Continuing coverage of this story is best found on Gawker. And just for the record, I’ve always disliked American Media--the company who bought out Radar's excellent website—whose clout came largely from Bonnie Fuller, who I hold responsible for practically everything wrong in America.

Don't Mess with the Media

I’ve read a lot about Sarah Palin. I find her interesting. I don’t hate her with the force of a thousand suns like a lot of my friends do, but I do believe she is completely over her head and is in no way ready for the national stage, and I think she’d be disastrous if given the opportunity to exercise her values legislatively.

Her beliefs are polarizing, to say the least. She has a way of creating enemies, and governs in a very personal manner. I think part of her charm is that she is cute and pretty, and leads what many consider to be an incredible life. I think many women wish they could pull off something like that; they ignore the warning signs, they ignore the pregnancy, her spurious background. She’s approachable, and that feeling wins out.

Luckily, her utter unpreparedness for a national campaign is finally becoming clear, and it’s become increasingly apparent that John McCain has made a terrible mistake by selecting her as his running mate, exacerbating the decision by following it up with the genius idea of shielding her from the press.

The media likes access; the media likes answers. They do not like rebuffs, refusals, or rejections. The media’s job is to get stories out to the public, and when people make their jobs difficult, they are not happy. The media can be your friend, and they are big on relationships—they can make or break you, so treat them well. Sarah Palin was a public figure before she became a vice-presidential candidate; she’s had experience interacting with the media, just on a smaller scale. For god’s sake, her degree is in journalism!

There’s a difference between demurring for privacy’s sake and outright refusing to answer questions because you have no answers. The only reason not to let the press talk to her was because they were hiding something—which is so completely obvious that it’s totally backfiring on the campaign.

But I just want to point out an interesting example of how media partnerships work, why it’s so important to cultivate positive relationships with them. From Vanity Fair, via Andrew Sullivan:

Obama, on the other hand, was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out (Murdoch executives tried to get the Kennedys to help smooth the way to an introduction), nothing. The Fox stain was on Murdoch.

It wasn’t until early in the summer that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged. The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down, knee to knee with Obama, at the Waldorf-Astoria. The younger man was deferential—and interested in his story. Obama pursued: What was Murdoch’s relationship with his father? How had he gotten from Adelaide to the top of the world?

Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought to share with Obama. He had known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—had met every American president from Harry Truman on—and this is what he understood: nobody got much time to make an impression. Leadership was about what you did in the first six months.

Then, after he said his piece, Murdoch switched places and let his special guest, Roger Ailes, sit knee to knee with Obama.

Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.

Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand.

A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.

Should the media be obligated to cover September 11?

Today, as I flipped on the radio, I came across a very serious morning show. Unlike other stations, discussing the usual gossip, the crew were talking about September 11. Today.

I was well aware what today was; I noted it when I was alerted to the date a few days ago. But today, this station was angrily reporting that there wasn't enough coverage. They sadly noted that the New York Times had nothing relating to September 11 on their cover (though they ran a very affecting story yesterday on the forgotten injured victims);
neither did the New York Post. "They usually do the right thing," the DJ lamented, and mentioned other papers: The Los Angeles Times had articles on terror, the Daily News went all out. The Star-Ledger, the Washington Post, Newsday all had it on their front covers, even the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. How could the big papers for the area that was affected the most not cover it?

Earlier in the broadcast, before I tuned in, there were indignant callers pleading for people to "move on". Then came the swarms of tearful people lashing out at those who couldn't understand that moving on was impossible. How dare they! It was all very riveting. Throughout the day, the only mention of the historic nature of the date was on this station; as the morning team had pointed out, even other stations weren't giving the day its due. Yes, it was seven years later, but never forget. It was the stories of hearing children--who were mere babies if they were born in 2001--not understanding the tragedy that got to me. I remember, even years ago, a young girl at the camp I worked with who knew of the day but didn't really get it. This was only a few years later, but it only underscored for me how quickly time passes.

I understand both sides. I understand the fatigue--do we really have to go through with this again? If there's more pressing news (which there wasn't; the Post's cover was especially malevolent on this day), I get not putting it as front and center. But so many issues dealing with September 11 aren't close to being solved, let alone the giant hole at Ground Zero, and now's the time to bring those issues to light. It is important to remember, especially as our entire world has changed since then. So much of what's defined America this century so far--and what continues to be the biggest issues in our future--is because of what happened on that gorgeous Tuesday seven years ago. We cannot forget that.

Come On

Again with the candidates and their eating habits, this time courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

Political commentators are busy analyzing and psychoanalyzing the presidential candidates' words for hints about the real Barack Obama and John McCain. We gastronomers have a better way of penetrating the campaign spin. We take the time-honored approach of that proto-food-blogger Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), who said: "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are."

At the very least, we believe that a candidate's taste in food is a more reliable indicator of character than the carefully strained statements issued in the current atmosphere of gotcha and gotcha back. So we have worked our sources and come up with the names of the candidates' favorite restaurants in their home states. We have tried them out and assessed what an appetite for their particular offerings might mean about two men with a 50-50 chance at spending the next four years ordering meals from the White House chef.

Can we move off this subject now? Why on earth would I pick a candidate based on--or even be interested in--their taste in restaurants?

I already know that John McCain likes to grill and that his campaign lifted a cookie recipe from the Food Network's website, and that Barack Obama is a fussy eater. Now both of them are pizza fans. Wow! That's so unusual. The only good thing about this article is that I now know some good restaurants in Chicago and Arizona.

"If I were to watch the news you hear in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts"

Kick-ass interview with Lara Logan from last week. (Only available in the episode's entirety at this point: roughly 13:35 to 20:30.)

She gives an idea how hard it is to get war stories on the air, although she does acknowledge that there are many producers who want to cover it. It's all about the bottom line, and war coverage doesn't sell unless it's sexy (you'd think Lara Logan would have that covered, but that's not what's getting traction). With news operations crunched for money and every day another major newspaper lays workers off, foreign news coverage is being cut or outsourced. The Nightly News regularly takes reports from the BBC. You could say, considering out foreign coverage isn't much to speak of, that this is a good thing, that we're making it easier on ourselves. But these reports are probably reedited to fit our viewpoints and standards, and still crunched in.

If I were a soldier, I'd be pissed.

I understand no one wants to hear depressing news, and the news is pretty damn depressing these days. I get asked how I'm still able to read the newspaper, considering how much negative information I process on a daily basis. The state of the world does worry me. But the media has to present this information; it has an obligation to inform the public and be as truthful and accurate as possible

Lara talks about Americans "being numb" to war information. Of course we're numb to it; it filters through one ear and out the other. We're not under siege (except by high gas and food prices), so we don't feel immediate concern or terror. Since the networks won't show graphic images for fear of upsetting us, we won't see the true horror. It's not surprising Afghanistan is considered the forgotten war, considering that much of the media forgot about it for so long, and even the recent headlines aren't enough to make us remember it for long. Statistics only work for a short while; it's searing images that stick. If television showed dead American soldiers like they showed Hurricane Katrina damage, these stories would get bigger play and people would care more.